Scott Merrill

Latest from Scott Merrill

In the beginning there was Amazon Simple Storage Service. And it was good. Soon after came Rackspace Cloud Files. And it was good. Today DreamHost is announcing their DreamObjects cloud storage solution to offer customers another hosted storage option.
DreamObjects storage is provided by Ceph, the distributed object store created by DreamHost co-founder Sage Weil. Ceph itself offers API… Read More

I participated in a panel discussion at LinuxCon today with other journalists who cover Linux and open source goings-on, including our own Alex Williams. One of the questions that was asked was “What was the most important story for you this week?”
The answers from my peer journalists were interesting, and reflect the diversity in interest (and beats) between us all. From… Read More

Hardware generally doesn’t interest me too much, so when I heard about the Open Compute project I didn’t give it too much attention. Casually reading up on the subject a little more left me even less interested. Why should Facebook have to design their own hardware, I wondered? Wouldn’t hardware vendors be clambering over each other to supply Facebook with gobs and gobs… Read More

The Linux kernel is the world’s largest collaborative development project. Almost 3,000 individual contributors work together to create and maintain an operating system kernel that works on everything from wristwatches and mobile phones to mainframes, along with all the peripherals imaginable for each platform. Linux creator Linus Torvalds sits at the top of a loose hierarchy of… Read More

At LinuxCon and CloudOpen this week, attendees are being bombarded with cloud, cloud, cloud. Most of the cloud goings-on revolve around OpenStack, the open source infrastructure-as-a-service project started by Rackspace and NASA. Today SUSE announced their SUSE Cloud product, which is a commercially supported version of OpenStack integreated with SUSE Linux. Red Hat has an unsupported… Read More

The overwhelming majority of web-based services today rely on Linux. More and more of these companies are joining the Linux Foundation, the “nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux.” The Linux Foundation provides a neutral ground for companies and users to discuss and collaborate on Linux’s development, so it makes sense for companies with large… Read More

When I think of APIs, I tend to think of mostly end-user data being passed back and forth between consumer websites and various client apps. Automated uploading to Flickr, for example, or consuming Twitter data in some way. I don’t think of chemical patent searches. SureChem just announced an API for just that function, though, which goes to show that automation and ubiquitous computing… Read More

Most days I have only three or four browser tabs open: GMail, Twitter, Google Reader, and whatever link I’ve clicked through from one of the previous three. I know folks, though, who regularly have two dozen or more tabs open. All day. Every day. They struggle to remember which tab has their GMail, only to find no new mail when they get there. Pausing a Last.fm stream requires an… Read More

Gluster was founded in 2005 to productize their eponymous global distributed filesystem, GlusterFS. As an all-software solution for storing immense quantities of distributed and replicated data, it quickly caught the eye of many working with big data including Red Hat, who purchased the company late last year.
Yesterday at Red Hat Summit, Red Hat officially announced their branded solution… Read More

Nature Publishing Group teamed up with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology to run an augmented reality advertising campaign. Point your tablet or smartphone at the print advertisement and watch the beautiful KAUST campus spring to life before you! You can click on the various departments, “talk” to virtual students, and peruse job openings hosted at Naturejobs. Read More

Marten Mickos is working on a joke. He has the opening line — “An app guy, an ops guy, and a VMware sales guy walk into a bar…” — but he hasn’t figured out what the punchline is, yet. Mickos is the former CEO of MySQL AB. Today he’s the CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, developers of private infrastructure as a service solutions, and he thinks about… Read More

If you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of years, you might be excused for not knowing about this Humble Bundle thing. As a long-time Linux user, the Humble Bundles have always been of interest to me, and I’ve always tried to support them financially. It’s also always been interesting to me that Linux users typically pay more for the Bundles than their Windows… Read More

As much fun as it is to view the world in a “Linux versus Microsoft” way, the reality is that a technology monoculture is less useful than a heterogenous one. Even Microsoft knows this: they’ve made a variety of tepid attempts to support integration with other operating systems for decades, because they know their customers are relying on those other systems. More… Read More

Samsung, the world’s leading producer of mobile phones, on Tuesday became a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation. Just the seventh company to join at the Platinum level, Samsung will now have a seat on the Linux Foundation Board of Directors. Samsung has long been a participant with the global Linux community, and as the largest manufacturer of Android handsets they’ve been… Read More

Mark Shuttleworth is the founder and former CEO of Canonical, the commercial company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Today he holds the position “Lead Product Design”, a role in which he shapes desktop and cloud product strategy. I spoke with him recently by phone about the increasing role of Linux in the enterprise, and the shift from traditional enterprise computing to… Read More

Every day companies are spending gobs of money to earn and keep your attention. Advertisers are collecting heaps of information about you in the hopes of presenting you with more targeted advertisements: advertisements on which you’ll want to click. Yet despite all of this information, advertising still pretty much sucks. It doesn’t have to be this way.
While marketers and… Read More

If you read the Red Hat website, you’ll find pages describing their attitude toward open source, collaboration, and more. It reads pretty much like every other marketing spiel from every company online today. There’s something different about Red Hat, though: they actually believe this stuff. Not only do they believe it, they live it every day.
I spoke to Red Hat CEO Jim… Read More

It wasn’t that long ago that I complained about cloud fragmentation issues. There were some interesting observations in the comments on that post. Now word comes that the Linux Foundation is hosting CloudOpen, a “new conference to advance openness in the cloud.”
Most of the major players are already committed to participating at CloudOpen: Canonical, Citrix, Dell, Eucalyptus… Read More

I think we can all safely agree that open source software development is here to stay. Open, collaborative development has fundamentally changed not only how we code, but also the code we produce. It’s easier than ever to build complex solutions by reusing existing components. A new report from Sonatype examines the current state of open source in the enterprise. Although heavily… Read More

The Millenium Technology Prize is a Finnish award designed “to improve the quality of life and to promote sustainable development-oriented research, development and innovation.” It’s awarded every two years. Sir Tim Berners-Lee won the prize in 2004. The 2012 Grand Prize winner will be announced on June 13 in Helsinki, Finland. The finalists this year are Dr. Shinya Yamanaka… Read More